Pools and Swimlanes

Businesses are often divided logically into functional departments (eg. accounting, marketing, sales, warehouse etc). Swimlanes show each of these departments relevant to a process. Using swimlanes it can be seen when a process is crossing from the responsibility of one department to another. If two or more organisations are involved in a transaction (and typically for our purposes two are) then each organisation ay have its own internal swimlanes (i.e departments).

Pool – represents a participant in a process. Usually in the context of B2B situations.

Lane – represents a sub-partition within a pool. Lanes are used to organise and categorise activities.

This BPMN diagram example shows a pool (could represent one party/organisation in the process) and a pool divided into swimlanes.